After today I can allow myself to start the countdown to Gran Canaria in terms of days rather than weeks and, if I only include working days then it is only just into double figures and after Monday it will be down to single figures. By such arithmetical means do we keep our sanity!
Bear in mind that this term is thirteen weeks long without any significant break. The only break that some colleagues have had is a week with a group of kids on holiday! At least I had two long weekends and only part-time meetings for the other three days of the Fiasco Week. Three months of a solid school term is a ridiculous concept - and an even worse reality!
Disturbingly, I am informed by a knowledgeable Scot of my acquaintance that Gran Canaria has taken on a worryingly lush-green persuasion. This is usually indicative of an unnecessary profusion of water which is totally contrary to my requirements for a satisfactorily arid holiday. I do not fly to an island off the coast of Africa to be surrounded by a profusion of succulent grass!
I reassure myself with the knowledge that each day into April is a day nearer to the security of the summer and that in Gran Canaria sun is usually so dependable that even the most paranoid Briton can usually dispense with the nervous early-morning daily ritual of twitching aside the curtains to check that the sun is performing as ordered.
The holiday is rapidly approaching a mythic status in my mind becoming a future cornucopia of rest, relaxation and delight. In short it is now the only way to get through the next term with anything like a simulacrum of intelligence and personality left inside the hollow form of the teacher shapes that we inhabit!
I am now stuck in the library with, unusually, kids! At this point on a Friday I am usually left alone in glorious isolation and can stare at the sun on the balcony with impunity. Now there are kids catching up on lost work and there are three members of staff in here!
I am about to start on my second three period stretch without a break in two days: this timetable is a positive delight – but only when seen from the perspective of the weekend when it is behind you, and emphatically not on a Sunday when it is all before you.
It is true that for teachers the traditional low point of our lives is late afternoon on a Sunday when the reality of the following day and consequent week cannot be ignored. It is the time to do frantic work for the morrow or feel guilty about not doing work. There is no escape from the inevitable feelings of dread and or guilt which deadens even further a typically dead day!
To celebrate the end of the week (ten working days to go to Gran Canaria!) we went to Sitges to pick up my long delayed repair of my glasses. As I have now replaced everything in the glasses apart from the lenses the shop I go to gave me a 25% discount and so I “only” paid €60 for a thin piece of metal forming the replacement nose piece!
At least dinner in our “usual” restaurant was better value for money!
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